Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

The second of the three state parks which make up the Redwood National Park complex is Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. This state park was originally established in 1923. It contains 14,000 acres of forest, meadow, and coastline, including 13,600 acres of old growth forest.

This park is accessible by a road which runs parallel to Highway 101, known at the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, which is shown below. The road leads through this prairie as well as magnificent stands of old growth redwood forest. Drury was the first secretary and later president and chairman of the board of the Save-the-Redwoods-League.

The current parkway used to be Highway 101 which ran through the very center of the park. In 1992 a bypass, which is now Highway 101, was completed, moving traffic away from this sensitive area of the park.

The park office and Elk Prairie Visitor Center of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is shown below. As with many other national parks, a lot of work was done on the facilities of the park, including construction of this building, by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression.

The centerpiece of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is the large grassy meadow known as Elk Prairie, pictured below.

There is a dirt and gravel road--Davison Road--which connects Highway 101 with the beach area of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. The road has been discussed above in the section on Roosevelt Elk. A portion of the 8 mile road is shown below as in runs the forest and hills east of the coast. The road was named for an early (1889) homesteader, Arthur Davison.

Davison Road continues through the hills and then, after passing an entrance station for Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park 3.7 miles from Highway 101, runs in a north-south direction between the Gold Bluffs and the beach.

At the end of the road is a parking lot which serves trails leading to the beach, the Fern Canyon picnic area, and the trailhead for Fern Canyon trail. A meadow shown to that trail on the way to Fern Canyon is shown below.

Prairie Creek Redwood State Park features a wide, beautiful beach in the coastal area. The picture below shown the beach looking south from the area near the Fern Canyon picnic area.

Below is another view of the Fern Canyon Beach, looking inland toward Fern Canyon itself.

Interestingly, the wide beach the visitor encounters now was not always present. In the gold mining era, described below, these wide beaches did not exist and the bluffs and hills were much closer to the ocean.

The Gold Bluffs One of the noteworthy of the features of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is the Gold Bluffs along the coast. These ocher-tinged cliffs run approximately from the mouth of Redwood Creek in the south to the Klamath River in the north.

The Gold Bluffs reach a height of about 200 feet. They are made up of cobble conglomerates, medium grained sandstone, and stillstone.

As might be inferred from their name, these bluffs contained some gold. In 1850, gold was found as dust layers lying on the Gold bluffs Beach area. The bluffs themselves are sediments deposited by the ancestral Klamath River which brought the traces of gold from inland mountains. The mouth of the river is, today, located further north of the Gold Bluffs area.

The gold boom in the bluffs area was short lived, as it proved prohibitively expensive to separate the gold and the sand, and access to the gold mining areas was lessened by the increasing width of the beach, which, as can be seen above, is quite wide now.